Inner Worlds, Under Open Skies by Dia al-Azzawi

La Galerie 38, Geneva, hosts Inner Worlds, Under Open Skies, an exhibition by Dia al-Azzawi. For the occasion, Zouina Ait Slimani released a new text, “Mapping the Intimate: Memory, Displacement and Fragmented Geographies.”

As part of Nuit des Bains and Geneva Art Week, La Galerie 38 presents, for the first time, a solo exhibition devoted to Dia al-Azzawi, a major figure in modern and contemporary art from the Arab world. Inner Worlds, Under Open Skies brings together a previously unseen group of recent paintings, presented to the public for the first time. The exhibition foregrounds a subtle dialogue between interior space and landscape, personal memory and lived experience, within a body of work in which the territories encountered gradually become spaces of recollection, perception, and transformation.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new text by Zouina Ait Slimani, “Mapping the Intimate: Memory, Displacement and Fragmented Geographies.” A scholar specializing in the history of art of Iraq, and the author of a Master’s thesis devoted to Dia al-Azzawi, Ait Slimani traces the artist’s trajectory from Baghdad to Beirut, and then to London, where he settled after leaving Iraq and which has remained his principal vantage point ever since. Through this trajectory, Azzawi’s gaze extends from the Levant to the Maghreb, from East to West, and from ancient civilizations to contemporary landscapes. Territory undergoes a gradual metamorphosis: from geographical space, it becomes memory, and then a pictorial language. Exile thus emerges not as a definitive rupture, but as a continuous process of transformation, through which places left behind, traversed, or imagined are reconfigured within the painting.

The text also examines Azzawi’s self-proclaimed marginality, not as a form of exclusion, but as a position of observation and displacement—a productive in-between space from which multiple narratives can coexist without being reduced to one another. Garden, mountain, light, and colour become carriers of multiple geographies and layered memories, translated into sensations, signs, and forms rather than rendered as mere representations. The exhibition ultimately invites us to consider Azzawi’s painting as a space of circulation between places and times, where the intimate and the geographical, memory and imagination, rootedness and displacement remain in a state of constant tension.

The exhibition runs at La Galerie 38, Geneva, from September 17 to December 19, 2026. The opening reception will be on September 17, from 6 pm.